11. Liath
LIATH
Ijerked around.
Deargán stepped in through the doorway, closing it behind him with a quiet click, without breaking eye contact.
My fingers went numb. The burned file slipped from my hands and pages scattered across the floor in a soft flutter.
Something flashed behind his eyes when he looked down to see the evidence of my snooping, and then it was gone, smoothed into that trained calm that made my skin crawl.
He strode across the room, fists by his side.
I backed up until my hip hit the edge of his bookshelf.
But he didn’t come for me. He kneeled, gathering the fragile pages with a care that didn’t match the rest of him, almost reverent, fingertips gentle on the brittle paper as if he feared they would crumble.
I bent automatically to help. I wanted to fix the mess, wanted to make this less bad, wanted to pretend we were two people cleaning up a spill instead of predator and prey.
“Don’t.”
One word, firm and final. He didn’t even look at me when he said it.
I froze halfway down, then straightened, humiliation flushing hot across my face. Every excuse I’d rehearsed, every lie about being lost or curious, collapsed into dust.
I stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to do with my hands, feeling like a schoolgirl waiting for detention.
Finally he stood and tucked the file under his arm like he was guarding it. His gaze lifted to me and there was nothing in it I could decipher.
His eyes narrowed. “Now I have to adjust.”
Dread rolled through me. Adjust what? Adjust his therapy plan? Adjust my treatment?
Adjust me?
“Session canceled,” he said, cold and final.
“But,” I started, because arguing was a reflex, because I needed to say something that proved I still had a voice.
“You’re dismissed.”
He turned away before I could read his face, and the refusal to look at me felt deliberate, like he was punishing me by withholding himself.
I moved without remembering the first step.
One moment I was standing in the middle of his office with my pulse in my ears and my shame burning on my skin, and the next I was stumbling through the doorway, my fingers scraping the doorframe as I passed.
The corridor air hit my face and it was too bright, too ordinary, like the world didn’t know what I’d just touched.
My chest hurt. Not from fear. From something worse.
Disappointment.
I’d wanted him angry. I’d wanted him to lose control for one second, to show he was human, to show he cared about anything beyond his clinical little script.
Instead, he’d gone cold and detached, and it hurt like a personal rejection.
Like I’d reached for him and found nothing.
I hated that it hurt.
I hated that some part of me would rather be punished than ignored.
I arrived at my next session with my shoulders pulled back and my jaw set hard, but my pulse wouldn’t steady no matter how many slow breaths I forced into my lungs.
I stood in the dim corridor outside Deargán’s therapy room, staring at the brass handle until the metal blurred, telling myself I was braced for whatever punishment he chose, whether that meant dragging me back into the chair and dissecting me piece by piece or throwing me into isolation.
I lifted my hand and knocked.
The latch turned and I flinched as if bracing for a slap.
Deargán opened the door and for a moment he just stood there, filling up the doorway with his presence.
I fought the urge to back up, fought the apology bubbling up my throat as I watched for the flash of temper, the sting in his voice.
His gaze held mine a beat too long, unreadable and cold.
“Come with me.”
He stepped past me and walked down the hallway without looking back.
My feet refused to move for a beat, rooted to the stone.
That was it?
No cold lecture. No clipped, clinical warning. No punishment.
Nothing?
Or maybe he was leading me to my doom.
I followed him, my shoes sounding too loud behind his measured stride.
We turned left, then right, then down a narrower passage where the light from the old sconces grew lower and dimmer, making long shadows against the heavy brocade wallpaper.
I hadn’t been to this part of the asylum. I had no idea what lay in wait.
“W-where are we going?” I dared to ask.
He spoke without looking back. “I thought I’d bring you somewhere more… disarming.”
My throat tightened. Disarming for who?
I tasted a trap.
He stopped at a set of tall double doors, the wood thick and heavy, the brass handles worn shiny by a thousand palms.
He pushed them open.
Dust-filtered light bled through the high arched windows, falling in pale spectral stripes across a labyrinth of nearly black wooden tables.
Towering carved shelves loomed above them, their wrought-iron ladders clinging to the rails like skeletal rib cages.
Endless rows of cracked leather spines sat in the shadows, keeping their secrets contained in hushed silence.
The air smelled of paper and iron and polish, with a faint bite of something metallic underneath that made my synesthesia stir, a thin ache of a piano note pressed behind my eyes, gentle and insistent, like someone testing a key.
I stepped inside, my eyes widening at the cavernous library, like the mouth of an ancient beast, my steps hesitant as if it might wake and swallow me whole.
Deargán gestured toward an alcove by a window where a few armchairs sat angled toward each other like a confession circle.
“Sit,” he said.
I picked a chair and lowered myself onto it, my spine stiff, my hands curling into the fabric at the edges as if the chair could anchor me.
He sat opposite, close enough to be present and far enough to make it clear he wasn’t offering comfort. He didn’t pull the chair nearer. He didn’t lean back either.
He simply watched me.
My skin prickled under his gaze.
The silence stretched, just long enough that I could hear the distant soft creak of the building settling and the far-off clink of something being moved down a corridor.
I couldn’t hold it. I blurted out. “Are we going to talk about what I found in your desk?”
His voice stayed even. “Perhaps we should talk about how it made you feel, Rua.”
The name hit like a thumb pressed into a bruise.
My hands tightened into the cushions. “Don’t.”
His brows lifted a fraction. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t flip it back on me like that,” I snapped. “Like I’m a case study.”
His head tilted slightly. “You broke into my office.”
My breath caught, then it came out hotter. “Because you’re lying.”
“About what?”
It didn’t seem like a question. It felt like a prompt. Like he was letting me gather my own rope.
“My name,” I said, my jaw grinding. “For starters.”
“Fact.” He did not raise his voice. “I have been your doctor for six months. Fact. Your mental state is fragile. Fact.” His gaze held mine, cool and unblinking. “Your name is Rua. Whether you acknowledge it or not.”
I opened my mouth to argue and the fight thinned out before it reached my tongue. If I pushed back too hard, I would look hysterical. If I stayed quiet, I would look compliant. Either way, he had set up the chessboard for me to lose.
I forced myself to sit straighter, to keep my breathing even. “If you’re so certain,” I said, careful now, careful not to sound wild, “then tell me something real. About me.”
His mouth curved. “You mean something that proves you are Rua.”
I nodded.
“You used to come here when you couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said, my shoulders locking, my voice coming out louder than I wanted, the sound bouncing off the shelves and climbing up into the rafters where the echo seemed to taunt me.
“Every time,” he continued, with a small nod, “you sit in that very chair.”
The room shifted around the edges. I did not look down at the chair. I refused to give him that.
“Coincidence,” I managed.
“You read—”
“Lots of people read.”
He let out a soft sigh as if I’d disappointed him. “You read, not because you like stories, but because it is the only time your head goes quiet.”
I kept my face still, but my fingers pressed harder into the armrests, anchoring myself to the fabric.
“You don’t know anything about my head,” I snapped.
“You hate being watched when you’re not performing.”
I let out a curt laugh. “That’s hardly unique.”
“No,” he said evenly. “But most people stop performing eventually. You don’t.”
My thoughts scattered, then scrambled to reassemble. I couldn’t tell if he was describing me or constructing me in real time.
“You script arguments,” he went on. “You script apologies. You script exits.”
Heat climbed my neck. I had done that in the corridor outside his office only minutes ago, rehearsing every possible version of this conversation.
I said nothing. Silence felt safer than denial.
“You smile in rooms where you feel like an imposter,” he continued.
“That’s called being human,” I said, but it sounded thin.
He leaned closer, not enough to touch, just enough that his presence filled the space between us. When he spoke again, his voice lowered, precise and almost too quiet to catch, forcing me to tilt toward him, drawn in without meaning to.
“Sometimes,” he said, his voice rumbling in my ears, “you stand in the middle of a room full of people, and even though you’re smiling, you wonder if anyone else feels as lonely as you do.”
“You…” My throat tightened until the word scraped out of me. “You’re guessing.”
His gaze stayed pinned on me. “Am I?”
This close I could see how thick his dark lashes were. Could see that his frown lines were etched in, while the crinkles around his eyes were fine, like he had more reasons to frown than smile for too many years.
“Sometimes,” he continued, and my gaze caught on the way his lips moved as he spoke, “you listen to other girls laughing, truly laughing, and wonder what was wrong with you because yours is never real.”
My breath hitched. Heat crawled up my neck, a stupid, traitorous awareness of him sitting there, of his voice sliding under my skin.
“You’re sick to death of being good,” he said.
My fingers curled tighter into the fabric; my pulse thudded hard behind my ribs.
“You’re tired of swallowing your anger.”
I wanted to shake my head. I couldn’t.
“And you’re so fed up with being polite,” he added, precise, almost gentle, “you want to smash something apart just to prove you’re alive.”
The words landed too neatly. Too true. It cleaved into my chest.
“How do you know that?” I heard myself say, sounding like it was underwater.
He smiled as if nothing in the world had shifted.
“You told me.”
“Don’t be taking the piss,” I shot back, the words rougher than I meant them to be. “I never told you that. Not a chance.”
His head inclined, patient as a blade.
“You tell me everything, Rua,” he said. “You trust me. You just… don’t remember.”